Sheriff Tom Dart on Thursday said the way Cook County buries the indigent is “appalling” and called for an end to the practice of stacking caskets on top of each other and putting multiple remains in a single casket.

Dart said Homewood Memorial Gardens, which holds the county contract for indigent burials, has no system to map where bodies are buried, which could impede criminal investigations if bodies need to be exhumed.

Cemetery president Tom Flynn denied Dart's allegations and said the cemetery maintains file cards with information on the bodies of indigents, as required by its county contract.

“We even give the (Cook County) medical examiner’s office a location on all these people when we send the bill out,” Flynn said. “I don't know where he [Dart] got his information.”

In a news conference, Dart said that the bodies of up to 26 babies had been buried in a single casket along with a unidentified limbs and bones.

The Cook County medical examiner’s office, which prepares the bodies of indigents for burial, said its policy is that the remains of multiple fetuses and stillborn babies can be put into a single casket, but in every other case only one body is put in a casket. Jessey Neves, a spokeswoman for Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle's office, said no other “types of remains” are put in the caskets with bodies.

Dart is backing a bill sponsored by his former chief of staff, state Rep. William Cunningham, D-Chicago, which would require coroners and medical examiners to obtain DNA samples from unidentified bodies before burial, then affix a metal identification tag on the bodies.

Neves said the medical examiner’s office said it takes DNA samples from the bodies of indigent and unidentified people unless the remains are too decomposed.

Officials at medical examiner and coroner offices that serve Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Los Angeles said they take DNA samples from all unidentified bodies. Bodies of indigent or unidentified people are buried in individual graves in Milwaukee and Minneapolis. Los Angeles County cremates the remains.

Dart said he wants hearings to be held before Cook County renews its contract with Homewood Memorial Gardens, which has handled indigent burials since 1980.

The cemetery bills the county $239 for each casket. Over 30 years, the county has averaged 250 indigent burials a year, though only 137 such burials took place last year, according to Dart.